Sara Moore Wagner’s review of Heather Minette’s ~Half Light~

Heather Minette’s collection Half Light is an exploration of death, both real and imagined, of people and of romance. It moves from a child-like fear of death, of the loss of a parent, to a mature portrait of how to deal with the loss of a child and a lover. Minette has the keen ability to relocate the reader into these often simple, domestic spaces through unadorned imagery wound around an emotional core. Lines like “I tell them he is not here. / And the Fireflies are gone, too” (from “Penitentiary”) convey this loss in simple, but profoundly moving terms.

The first section ends with the poem “Sand Mermaids” where she compares the impermanence of her mother to “papier-mache faces that fall from tall bookshelves,” an image which captures the ethereal and often panic-inducing feeling of the loss which awaits us all as we transition from childhood to adulthood.